Mountain Breath

Miles out from the foothills at the end of a July light:

look up and west.

Peer beyond those ridges, to the verdant valleys

nestled between weighty hills.

Then, when the sun hangs low,

and the clouds grow heavy, spilling with wet pearls

You will see the earth reborn.

Breath goes climbing and life comes falling, in drops, sheets.

Watch it come graceful and smooth over all,

heaven and creation.

I stood east of the range, and

saw the great land go up,

crawling through golden, misted flame,

reaching into the lungs of God.

He spat life down on the hills.

I watched with the eye He gave me,

and I will tell you—with the rhythm of

the rain in my chest—this:

This is the way of the rain,

the Creator falling with the air.

I Was Climbing In The Rain (Brand New Poem!)

When the kettle came off the stove
with a whistle and the smell of forgotten toast
I cursed the coils for trapping food beneath themselves.
Such greed displayed in the morsel hoarded there.
I thought it selfish.
And the steam
when I emptied the steel out into my glass mug
crawled up the air and I felt it on my cheek
because it was a quiet love letter
from some man some place.
I closed my eyes and felt its warmth to my shoulders and down
so I breathed and grabbed my keys.

It was raining and I thought it ought to be snow—
quiet and cold—just the same with the
sliding of tires on the hill and the way my eyes felt.
But my cheeks were still warm from the steam and
the color stayed until I opened my empty mailbox
and remembered my eye-open dreams
where letters are for novels and
tea waited, steeping for me.

I smiled at the sadness of reality
that I, with words like these, might
not know an address for their envelope.
So in the buzzing yellow and the icy drops
I laughed like tobacco at the thought of you,
and how you had let me become a drug
that you could swirl in your fingers and exhale
in any weather.
Smoke to climb the same air, to break under falling love.

We Knew Time (and a note)

Inspired by a summer's sleep with Kurt Vonnegut and Jack Kerouac

I had hummingbirds and refracted light for birthdays.
Life was miracles and moments that floated on whirs of backward wings.
At their beats, your beauty swept in me, and pulled webs from atrial corners
with straw bristles that pricked up through my chest to you.

I desired the endless; you asked who could say anything of us.
The stars! I cried: The stars who fall and our wishes
answer pleas for tomorrow, for more days, time.
To the stars, the birds, the colors! Magic and wonder—
Love, I was a child again on logs over streams
in mosquitoless, thin air beside you.

Those June hours ambled along like we knew time, though
it laughed us off—whimsies on the road with some dead language.
I told stories of beauty without pain, of flesh off bone,
and lost my own speech to questions novels asked: If this isn’t nice, what is?

There was Independence pumpkin pie on the bridge, on a night without pops in the sky
because the rain soaked the fuses of all the men in our towns.
We had Broadway bookstores, their paperbacks for our change and
I gorged myself on the scribble of a dream—a world where the rain kept coming.
But it slowed. And the days shortened so the cinematic light
ushered us to darkness on plazas and porches.

Without cover, we watched shooting stars in backseats and coffee shops
with fewer words between us, yet ever more beneath us.
On broken color and falling light, I wished for more time—which you spent with
ignorance of the short season we pretended to enjoy, or did—maybe.

There had been days rich with rain and walks in soggy denim
on Friday nights when I—with dripping hair—would ask you why.
Then there was Tuesday outside the speckled library windows
when the books stayed shelved: out of our hands, dry from the air.

But under hot blues, words of the published men in our eyes went out my mouth
and in your ears as July cried in the dry heat, while we sat poolside and silent.
The heat came on with hurricane breath and desert air,
then we shriveled as sprinklers spat and the backwards birds kissed us goodbye.

The summer drought sucked the color and give of our skin, which
left us to watch as it flaked and burned.
We knew time like the touch of arid rainbows,
ruby-throated, and almost alive.

Hey all, this piece was going to wait to see the blog until summertime, but today felt like an appropriate day to post it. I just hit 1,400 views, and I'm pretty excited about it. Thanks for reading and supporting me. And now I have a favor to ask: share me with someone you know. There are about 50 of you who consistently read when I post, and if each of you share this poem with a friend who you think might enjoy my type of writing, it'll make a huge difference for me. If you didn't know, I started this blog in hopes of establishing a readership to help me get published in the next year or two, and now it's time to move past having only people who know me as followers. Again, I'm so grateful that you have all been reading, and I'm humbled by the numbers.
Easy option to be a huge help: share the link on Facebook. I can't even tell you all how big it would be for me if you each got one more person to start checking back here consistently. SO big!

Let's make it happen. Have a great day everybody. Let's get to 1,500 by tomorrow!